A customer may request a network service provider to guarantee the performance of one or more network services. For example, the service provider and the customer may detail the level of network performance for a service to be received by the customer in a Service Level Agreement (SLA). For example, a SLA may detail transport level service assurances for a service using performance parameters such as: frequency of loss events, duration of loss events, packet loss rates, delay, delay variation, etc. Failing to meet an SLA guarantee may result in a service disruption for the customer. In addition, the failure to meet an SLA guarantee may result in a loss of revenue for the customer and/or the network service provider.
The service provider may perform compliance monitoring to ensure that SLA targets are met. The compliance monitoring may be performed passively by collecting network data or actively by injecting measurement probes. Passive measurements are performed on a link-by-link basis and are not well suited to end-to-end performance targets. Current active measurements are focused on assessing a specific parameter (e.g., delay or loss), and are often not sufficiently accurate to determine whether an SLA has been violated.